US COVID-19 deaths with nearly 80,000 lives lost, hit worst in January

January has already become the worst month for US Covid-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic. As of Tuesday, there have been more than 79,000 coronavirus fatalities, topping the previous record set in December by more than a thousand, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The grim milestone underpins the growing demand from state officials for more vaccines so that Americans can be inoculated more quickly.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 coordinator Jeff Zients told governors that allocations would increase by around 16% starting next week, according to a source with knowledge of the call.

Biden has pushed for 100 million vaccination shots in the first 100 days of his presidency, but with a long road ahead for vaccinations, he also called for 100 days of mask-wearing.

“The brutal truth is it’s going to take months before we can get the majority of Americans vaccinated. Months. In the next few months, masks, not vaccines, are the best defense against Covid-19,” Biden said while announcing the federal government would buy and distribute more vaccine doses from Moderna and Pfizer.

With those additional doses, Biden said there would be enough to fully vaccinate 300 million Americans nearly the entire US population by the end of summer or early fall.

Struggling after the stress of nearly a year of responding to the pandemic, states are eager to administer vaccines quickly and attempt a return to life as normal.

The director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention said he was “very encouraged” by the new presidential administration’s approach to vaccinations, but that the state is still struggling with the dearth of vaccines.

“We know that right now the number of individuals who want to be vaccinated greatly outstrips the supply of vaccines that we have available,” Dr. Nirav Shah said.

Adding to public fears is the spread of variants of the coronavirus, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla tried to calm fears around the variants with assurances that the groundwork is already being laid to fight them.

“We should not be frightened, but I think we need to be prepared,” Bourla said during the Bloomberg The Year Ahead event Tuesday. “Once we discover something that it is not as effective, we will very, very quickly produce a booster dose that will be a small variation to the current one.”